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 | | José Pena | | | Inducted 1995 | | | Photo: Tracy Baim/Outline & Nightlines | | As a pioneering video artist at Sidetrack, he has created a unique style of showtune entertainment in a bar environment for thousands of Chicagoans and visitors to enjoy as they grow communally. With his business and domestic partner, he has also made the bar into a source of political and financial support for AIDS work and lesbian and gay rights efforts. | |
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| José Pepin Pena (even better known today as "Pep") is renowned as a video artist for having created a unique style of showtune entertainment in a bar environment. Before he developed the concept at Chicago's Sidetrack, of which he is co-proprietor, it existed in none of the nation's video bars.
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| Beyond these artistic achievements, as a popular Chicago bartender throughout the 1970s in the period before National Coming Out Day, Pena advised and encouraged hundreds of Chicago gay men as they learned to be proud and to live full gay lives. | |
| He continues as a nurturer of the community in his current business role. The atmosphere created by Pena's brand of video itself breeds a communal sense: On all the monitors during any given show, he offers a single unified production to engage patrons' attention, rather than foster a variety of competing images onscreen or among the crowd.
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| Since its 1982 establishment, Pena's Sidetrack bar has also contributed untold facilities, time, and money in support of AIDS work and lesbian and gay rights efforts. | |
| Pena's love of video and its messages began as he was growing up Jos‚ Pena and watching American films in the Havana of the 1950s. After the revolution, he fled Cuba, later brought his brother and sister to Miami, and reared them until he could arrange for his mother to come to the United States. Through a variety of humdrum jobs, he helped to support his younger siblings' education, forsaking thoughts of medical school for himself.
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| In 1968, Pena moved to Chicago and soon became a celebrated bartender at such 1970s establishments as Shari's, Ruthie's, Carol's Coming Out Pub, Alfie's, and the Annex. Despite an interest in music, he failed at attempts to land a DJ job, but eventually an observant entrepreneur recruited him in early 1982 to help open a video bar, which was then a new concept.
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| Business prospects were uncertain, but before long the bar became a success, with Pena and his domestic and business partner, Arthur Johnston, taking the helm after the sudden Florida death of the founding entrepreneur.
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| Ever since, Pena and his business partners and staff have coupled innovation with a keen sense of detail to enrich not only the business itself but also the culture and self-esteem of its large clientele.
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| In 1995, Pena's contributions to community and art were memorialized by the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus in its production Sidetrack: The Musical
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| This biography is as of the induction date. It has not been updated. |
| Additional information is available for items referenced in the biography of José Pena at the following sites: |
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